Somewhere between my childhood and my kids’, I forgot how much fun a family camping trip can be. I wouldn’t say it was a regular event in my family growing up, but we camped often enough to enjoy it, but it was only this fall that I finally got my kids out camping and remembered just how much fun it can be for a family. After a night out under the stars (and of course the planets which the boys identified), roasting marshmallows and broccoli (I swear they requested it), I realized it would be the kind of trip we’d make sure to do more regularly.

Our kids have been in pre-school since they were six months old. While the first few years were mostly like daycare, as they started pre-k last year, the experience became more like what I expected from public school. Their assignments, daily curriculum, and activities started to look more like what I thought they’d be doing in Kindergarten. So when they started public kindergarten this year, I figured I knew pretty much what we’d be getting into.

For as many things as the pandemic took from us like traveling and in person events, it did provide an incredible transformative opportunity for us to reimagine work and rethink some of the basic foundations of how we get things done. No longer tethered to our offices and commutes, many of us got to reconsider what actually makes for productive work and how we can best balance our work and home life.

I’ve had my new iPhone 13 less than a month now, but I absolutely love it so far. Not only is the overall design great, and the battery better than my two year old iPhone 11, the camera is outstanding and has already enabled a ton of great photos I couldn’t take before. After finally making it more than a year between phone upgrades, I’m glad I waited for the 13 and really feel the big upgrade.

My last flight was in January of 2020 to Seattle for work. Two months later, while we were actually in Washington DC (we took the train there interestingly), our offices began shutting down, work was moved remote, and shortly after, daycare even closed down for the next several months. A month later we would welcome our third child in the hospital in the midst of pandemic uncertainty and likely the height of the early pandemic anxiety.

At the start of the year, I made a resolution to switch at least the majority of my diet to vegetarian, and even try to make vegan choices as often as possible. Three quarters through the year now, it’s been mixed, but there have been some major wins to balance out from the slip ups and misses. At this point, I have a pretty good sense of where the biggest challenges lay and what goals will be feasible for the next year and beyond.

With this week’s news that Pfizer’s vaccination trials on kids 5-11 has shown positive results and that they will request FDA emergency approval soon, there is finally some cause for optimism for parents after a long year and a half. However, every time I tell people how excited I am to get them the shot, they ask if we are really going to do it right away. Here’s the thing, yeah, we are.

The Jersey Shore has a lot of connotations, mostly negative ones about clubs and wild night life. However, for the second year in a row, we’ve found that the shore town of Cape May, and even the surrounding areas we branched out more to this time, like Wildwood, are more down to earth, relaxed, and family-friendly than just about any other beach town. For our second annual trip with the whole family for the end of summer, we fell in love with the town and the other families that visit Cape May and the beaches.

A decade ago, I had only just recently been married, bought a house, and got our dog together. We also had exactly zero children, so life was pretty different then. I doubt I could have predicted any of these big changes in my life, but actually the thing that I thought was probably least likely was that I’d still be in the same company ten years later. Leaving the financial industry and joining Audible / Amazon, I knew it would be different and more to my liking, but I didn’t expect to still be at Amazon over a decade later.

We moved to Florham Park less than six months ago, and yet I feel like I already know more about the area and the history of the town better than I did after ten years in Wanaque. Maybe it’s running around a far more accessible town, seeing more of it, maybe it’s the tighter sense of community, or maybe it’s the pride the town has in its history through volunteer clubs and a historical society.